Film · 1982 · Films · 1980s
The Thing
Scored from 1,111 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
John Carpenter's adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.'s story "Who Goes There?" confines twelve men to an American research station in Antarctica in the winter of 1982. After a Norwegian helicopter crew is destroyed chasing a sled dog onto the base, the Americans — with helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) drifting into command — find an excavated spacecraft in the ice and a parasitic organism that absorbs living creatures and reproduces them exactly. Since any of them may already be a copy, the crew's efforts to devise a test that distinguishes human from imitation dissolve into mutual suspicion and sabotage. Rob Bottin's practical creature effects and Ennio Morricone's score accompany what plays largely as a closed-room mystery.
The Thing (1982) is a film IMDb files under the horror, mystery and science-fiction genres. Its certificate is R. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 49m.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 1,111 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 1,172 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Thing lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 1,111.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
